Rhythm and Dues

Mike Gutierrez walked in to the usual after-hours jam session with Latin musicians at Pancho’s Flamingo in East Los Angeles. Except, this night in 1958, Tito Puente, el rey del timbal--the king of the timbal--showed up at the club near Pomona and Atlantic.

The band blasted Latin jazz and Caribbean sounds. Gutierrez and Puente stood side by side, small drums in front of them, each intending to prove himself the best timbal player.

“We had our little battle there,” Gutierrez remembers. “A lot of guys from East L.A. said I won. The house was in an uproar. The guys said, ‘Man, you made him sweat.’ ”

Fast-forward 41 years to a recent Saturday night.

Gutierrez is doing a fund-raiser in the gym of a private high school in Pasadena. To the salsa rhythm of Celia Cruz’s “Lo Tuyo Es Mental,” Gutierrez, now 67 and sporting a thinner and grayer ponytail, repeatedly flips a drumstick in the air, striking a cymbal just as the stick lands in his hand.

Tito Puente is not here. Neither is Bobby Montez, Eddie Cano, Cal Tjader, George Shearing or any of the other big names with whom Gutierrez shared the stage during that golden era of Latin music in Los Angeles during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Instead, in front of the microphone is his daughter, Leslie Paula Gutierrez, who inherited her dad’s love for music. His son, Ronnie, 39, had a separate solo gig this night, but he usually sits in as a percussionist with the family band known as “Leslie Paula and the Latin Soul Band.”

Much like the patriarch, the band, with its modest share of success, has not become famous.

Nonetheless, show business--beginning around the turn of the century when three Gutierrez brothers ran one of two Mexican circuses in California--has always been the family’s life and livelihood.

“My family history is everything,” said Leslie, 31. “Everything that I am today is because my grandmother was a tango singer in vaudeville, because my dad was in the circus, and because they paid their dues and handed it down to me. I’m lucky to have that in my blood.”

Every once in a while, a jacket or skirt that Leslie wears for a show may have belonged to her grandmother, Esperanza Gutierrez, who designed her own costumes for the circus.

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Indeed, there’s only one way to begin the story of the Gutierrez clan.

“Basically, I was born in the circus,” said Mike.

By about 1915 there were two circos Mexicanos in California: the Circo Escalante and the Circo Gutierrez.

The Gutierrezes based their operation near 4th Street and Fetterly Avenue in East L.A.

Frequently, the family loaded up a couple of elephants and its trademark puppet show and headed north, hitting small towns from Bakersfield to Sacramento.

Mike’s grandfather, Saturnino Gutierrez, had come to California from the Mexican state of Guanajuato. His three sons, Francisco, Juan and Amador--Mike’s father--started the circus.

Mexican circuses featured stages for variety shows. One day in the 1920s, a free-spirited young woman named Esperanza Salazar showed up at the Gutierrez circus looking for work as a tango singer.

Salazar had been one of eight children in Puerto Vallarta. Eyeing show business, the adventurous young woman pestered her parents until they allowed her to come to the United States with a family who was making the trip north.

Not too long after she joined the circus, the handsome woman with dark eyes and hair was dangling from a trapeze and commanding an elephant from atop its back. The more forward costumes she made for performances revealed her progressive nature.

Esperanza and Amador married and had two children: Jose and Miguel, or Mike, who was born in Sacramento.

Mike’s first assignment in the circus was as a clown at age 3. He lived the circus life for the next 15 years.

“For a while I’d go to school in every town, got beat up in every town,” he said. “You had to go to school because that was the law, but you were only going to be there one or two days.”

He learned to read mainly through books his mother got for him. After he turned 10, the majority of his schooling came through correspondence courses, but he spent a few months at Hollenbeck Middle School and his entire junior year at Roosevelt High School, both in East L.A. But by 15, he was walking on tightropes, bouncing on a trampoline and hanging from a trapeze. He had to pick up and go with the circus again.

“It was a hard life,” Mike said.

The demands of the circus were one thing. But the people the Gutierrez family encountered were also a challenge. In the 1930s and ‘40s, it was tough being of Mexican descent in California, but it was worse in states like Arkansas and Texas, Mike said.

“I remember driving down the highway, in a small town in Texas, there was a sign that said: ‘Mexicans don’t stop, keep going,’ ” he said.

Movies?

“They’d tell us, ‘You don’t go to this movie, you go over there.’ ” he remembers.

Food?

“We have a little place in the back where you can get your food through the window,” restaurant owners would tell his family.

Meanwhile, his music career was shaping up. He had shown some ability with the snare drum and trombone in the circus. When he was at Roosevelt High, the ROTC band director let him try playing baritone horn.

After a stint in the Army, Mike’s days in the circus came to an end, replaced by the lively Latin music scene of Los Angeles. There were numerous clubs from Whittier Boulevard on the Eastside to Broadway in downtown and Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. The Interlude. The Crescendo. The Latin Quarter. The M Club.

Bobby Montez, a popular act at the Hollywood Palladium, hired Mike to play percussion on five of his albums. “He was a great showman,” said Montez, 65, now retired and living in Chico. “He brought the house down in a lot of places we played.”

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The gym at Westridge School where Leslie is singing is not a prime venue, she knows. But she cherishes making a living through music and watching people learn how to dance salsa through her music.

The band has released two albums on a small Northern California label. “Holidays in Rhythm” came out last year while “Te Quiero/I Want You,” which Leslie dedicated to Mike, was released two weeks ago.

Leslie began singing as a child. She and Ronnie--the two youngest children--pursued music. Ronnie has played percussion for acts such as Warren Hill and the band All-4-One.

Mike and ex-wife Patricia’s two oldest children are Michael Gutierrez, 43, a building contractor and Susan Gutierrez, 40, who is vice president of sales and marketing for the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

The couple divorced almost 30 years ago but decided to remain close because of the children. Recently, both laughed about the old times while visiting Leslie and her husband, Anthony Lennon, in Santa Clarita.

The couple met in East L.A. When they first moved to Cypress in the 1960s, they were one of the first Latino families in the area.

“[Mike] asked, ‘Are you sure we are not going to have any problems because we are of Mexican descent?” Patricia remembers Mike’s interrogation of the real estate agent. “I was embarrassed he asked.”

There were no problems in that first neighborhood, but in the second, just a mile away, “some parents told me not to play with their kids,” Leslie said. “I didn’t understand what that meant until I was older.”

Leslie studied business at Cypress College for a while but decided to pursue singing in 1985. Her first gigs were with cruise lines.

Her band, whose musical styles range from salsa to pop, performs everywhere from clubs to corporate events. They do charitable work for organizations such as Childrens Hospital and Para Los Ninos in downtown L.A.

“Concerts are my favorite,” Leslie said, referring to the band’s once-a-month appearances at Marina del Rey’s Fisherman’s Village. “You’re reaching people who don’t get out to the clubs. . . . One lady at the marina is crazy about me. Every time I go to hug her she doesn’t want to let me go. She’s probably 80 years old.”

Leslie convinced her father to join her band four years ago.

After the music scene of his youth died down, Mike adapted to the changing times, learning country, rock--whatever was necessary to keep working.

His longest stint was 1965-75 at Casa Escobar on La Cienega in Hollywood, a family-owned club where Jim Morrison from the Doors would come in sometimes and sing with Mike’s band. Mike survived by doing the hotel and restaurant circuit around Los Angeles.

In the 1970s an agent had him change the name of his group from Miguel IV to the Formula so he could get work in mainstream establishments.

“You had to do stuff like that to keep working,” Mike said.

He worked until 1995--providing a middle-class lifestyle for his family--largely with the Escobar family, which had a handful of restaurants he played in around Southern California.

Even now, there’s no lack of work, Leslie said.

“I can’t tell you how many times people ask me, ‘So what do you do for a real job?’ ” she said. “Let’s face it, we are very lucky to do what makes us the happiest and make a living at it.”

Said Lennon, her husband and manager: “To me it’s something like you see in a movie or read in a book, to see the generations of entertainment that have come through Leslie’s family. We have tapes of Mike 30, 40 years ago when he was in the Vegas shows. He can tell you stories from the entertainment industry.”

In Mike’s later years, it’s not about money or fame anymore--it’s about family.

“How many parents can say they work with their children?” he said during a break from performing at Westridge School in Pasadena. “It’s a blessing, it’s like a second wind for me.”

Jose Cardenas can be reached by e-mail at jose.cardenas@latimes.com.